Happy Birthday, Amitabh Bachchan. Bollywood’s Shahenshah Turns 79

Amitabh Bachchan is perhaps the most famous alumnus of Nainital’s Sherwood College, and later Delhi University’s Kirori Mal College, where he was actively involved in theatre. At the time, acting wasn’t a priority for young Amitabh – who aspired to be an engineer or an officer with the Indian Air Force.

Before he realised his dream to, he worked in Kolkata with Shaw Wallace Breweries, which was followed by a stint with the shipping firm Bird & Co. as a freight broker.

But corporate Kolkata held little attraction for the young Amitabh. With his baritone, that would become his trademark later, left All India Radio unimpressed. His voice was deemed too heavy for radio and he was shown the door after auditioning for the post of newsreader.

He didn’t even qualify in the preliminary round of a talent contest held by Filmfare, which added salt to his wounds and a dejected Amitabh left Kolkata to join his parents in Delhi.

On February 16, 1969, Amitabh moved to Mumbai to try his luck as an actor and, with no place to stay, Big B spent many nights on the benches skirting Marine Drive. For a while he did radio spots that earned him Rs. 50 a month and morphed into the narrator’s role in Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome.

In a 1999 interview, Mr Bachchan admitted that at the time he had a driving license and, if his dream had failed, he would have resorted to the life of a cab driver.

But when his brother Ajitabh informed him that director K A Abbas was looking for a fresh face for his film Saat Hindustani, Amitabh arrived at the director’s doorstep armed with a letter of introduction from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, mother of his good friend Rajiv. He was cast as Muslim poet Anwar Ali Anwar and won the National Award for Best Newcomer in 1970. But despite this initial breakthrough, leading roles were hard to come by for the tall, dark but not conventionally handsome Amitabh.

The year 1971 saw six films that featured Big B, including Anand starring Rajesh Khanna that won Mr Bachchan the Filmfare Best Supporting Actor Award for his performance as Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee, the Bengali doctor fondly referred to as Babu Moshai by Rajesh Khanna’s Anand Sehgal. But even Anand offered no respite from the black hole that Big B’s career was languishing in even before it had taken off. He did some more itsy-bitsy roles here and there, and again took to the microphone as the voice of the narrator in the Rajesh Khanna starrer Bawarchi (1972). Some misses followed, including the 1973 film Saudagar alongside Nutan and Padma Khanna.